“Microsoft Corp.’s move to close the site where Nokia assembled its last mobile phone in Finland leaves it with a skeletal crew in the country, spelling the end of an era for what was once the world’s dominant handset manufacturer,” Adam Ewing and Kasper Viita report for Bloomberg. “Just 900 jobs will be left in Finland after the U.S. software giant slashes another 2,300 workers from the country, a fraction of the 24,000 that Nokia employed in 2000, when it reigned supreme in the global market for mobile devices. Microsoft will discontinue operations in Salo and focus its phone engineering and program management in Espoo and Tampere.”
“Nokia’s rapid decline from a powerhouse of innovation and design to a failing business scrambling to stem a loss of market share has sent shock waves through the Nordic country’s economy. At its peak in 2000, Nokia generated about 4 percent of Finland’s gross domestic product, and its reversal of fortunes hit the country hard as thousands of jobs were lost,” Ewing and Viita report. “Microsoft said Wednesday that demand for the handsets had not met original expectations.”
“‘One of the most successful industrial narratives of our nation ends in Salo,’ Antti Rantakokko, mayor of the southern town that’s widely considered the original hometown of Nokia phones, said in a statement,” Ewing and Viita report. “In its heyday, Nokia’s market value reached $320 billion, and its earnings reports were closely watched by investors. When Apple Inc. revolutionized the industry with its iPhone, Nokia failed to respond… Still, Finns can take solace in the fact that the Nokia name lives on. After the mobile-phone subsidiary was sold, the remaining business retained the name and entered rehabilitation with a focus on telecommunications equipment. As a sign of its regained prowess, Nokia agreed in April to buy French networking-equipment rival Alcatel-Lucent SA in a 15.6 billion-euro ($17 billion) deal. Nokia employed about 60,000 people at the end of last year.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Revolutionary iPhone.
Apple’s competitors should be embarrassed – their products look dated and amateurish next to Apple’s iPhone – which looks like it slipped off the side of the saucer and was mistakenly left behind by alien visitors. Apple’s so-called competitors have been leapfrogged by a wide margin. They should be crying. — MacDailyNews Take, January 10, 2007
Apple’s iPhone is a “niche product.” — Nokia’s then-CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, April 17, 2008. Olli-Pekka is currently “spending time with his family.”
SEE ALSO:
Beleaguered Microsoft axes up to 7,800 employees, writes off $7.6 billion from Nokia deal – July 8, 2015
Palm CEO: ‘We don’t want to follow design fads’; Nokia CEO challenges Apple over iPhone – February 13, 2007
Is Apple building ‘The Device?’ [revisited] – January 09, 2007
Is Apple building ‘The Device?’ – December 10, 2002
Does MDN have any plans to feature what the roadkill former leaders are currently doing, besides STwHF stuff? What is Olli@Nok, Ed@Palm, etc..doing these days? Stock and portfolio guidance? Anal-ysts for tech rags? Follow up gents.
Too bad for Finland. Nokia was one of their greatest success stories. Then Microsoft got their hands on them and drove them into the ground.
They had the Triple Whammy of their own hubris to begin with and then Elop The Flop, followed by a lethal dose of the clowns in Redmond to seal their fate.
When was Nokia ever a “powerhouse of innovation and design.” The problem is of course they WEREN’T. The Ed Colligan Syndrome reined supreme with the recalcitrant corporate thinking “we’re too big to fail.” Sorry fools, PC guys ARE just gonna walk in and take over. And did. So long, enjoy all the free time that’s suddenly opened up for family. I sure hope these lessons are being taught vin business school.
Given that they were a company that made paper, the rubber boots, the fact that they invented a number of communications standards including GSM and Bluetooth and at one point sold most of the phones in the world – I think their legacy is deserved.
On the other hand, the writing was on the wall when I showed my new iPhone to a top engineer at O2 here in the UK (in fact he’d bought it for my wife to give me, he got a crazy discount) who tried to tell me his N95 was better. It did some things of course than that gen 1 iPhone couldn’t do, but when he saw the UI in action and especially when my iPhone picked up its location from HIS wifi, while his N95 was still looking for a GPS signal, I could see on his face that he knew Nokia’s number was up.
I was referring to plain sight innovation & device design consumers would notice, not under the hood. But point taken. Yep I remember those thrilling heady days of the 2007 iPhone. It was just what the tech doctor ordered.
You’ve got the best of MDN in this post:
A whole bunch of people lost their jobs! Yay! Let’s celebrate by copying and pasting our “We told you so’s” for the 50th time.
“Embrace, extend, and extinguish”
It’s the Microsoft way.
Mission accomplished.
In 2013, this is what the jackasses from IDC predicted for Windows Phone in 2017:
http://www.windowscentral.com/idc-bright-future-windows-phone-10-per-globally-2017
I well remember when I first saw this article (and similar ones) way back when. These agencies think they know everything about the future and have the charts to prove it. These people are such arrogant bastards telling investors where to put their money. Right now, I’d say they look pretty damn stupid with their predictions. I’m sure I’d also seen some articles predicting that Windows Phone would eventually overtake iOS in the long-term. These people predicting things really pisses me off because I don’t think the future can be accurately determined, especially that far in advance. Windows Phone market share has gone nowhere since 2013 but these people were so sure it would be crawling up iOS’s butt in 2017. Where will Windows Phone end up now? Relegated with Windows netbooks.
Thanks to Microsoft, Nokia is dead dead dead. Whoever agreed to have MS take over is really stupid.
I’d give Steve Ballmer and his minion Stephen Elop much more credit for ruining Nokia than Apple. Now that Nokia can start making phones again it will be interesting to see if they do.